The Evil Queen
“''When she breaks the tender peel, to taste the apple in my hand, her breath will still, her blood congeal, then I'll be fairest in the land!” ―The Evil Queen on her plans to poison Snow White The '''Evil Queen', also known as the Wicked Queen or just the Queen (and sometimes instead identified by name as Queen Grimhilde) is the main antagonist of Disney's 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the first Disney animated features canon villain. Determined to remain the fairest of all, the Queen becomes insanely jealous of Snow White, the only one whose beauty surpasses her own. She eventually uses dark magic in the form of an aging potion to transform herself into the Witch, in a final attempt to do away with her only, unknowing rival. Depicted in early designs as a fat character, her appearance eventually evolved into a much more sinister, stately beauty. She is generally one of Disney's most iconic and menacing first villains, once being voted the 10th greatest movie villain of all time. The Queen was animated by Art Babbitt and the Witch by Norman Ferguson. Both were voiced by veteran actress Lucille La Verne. Although they are technically the same character, official materials such as the 1993 Disney Classics card set have depicted them as being different entities. Her name was given as Queen Grimhilde in some old publicity material and comics, but the Walt Disney company does not seem to acknowledge it as canon anymore. She is sometimes referred to as the Wicked Queen, while theme parks sometimes refer to her as the Snow Queen (Not to be confused with Elsa the Snow Queen). The Witch is sometimes referred to as the Old Hag after drinking the aging potion. The Evil Queen is, along with Maleficent, one of the most prominent of the Disney Villains. Background Physical Appearance The Queen is an icily beautiful woman with a serene, unfeeling face and a slender figure. She is pale-skinned with green eyes, long raven black hair, red lips and seemingly penciled-on eyebrows. Her features and her royal attire create a very stunning and beautiful Queenly image. The Queen is seen wearing a purple gown with long sleeves and a red rope belt tied around her waist. She wears a black balaclava that covers her ears, neck and hair, leaving her face exposed. The Queen wears a long black cloak that appears to be part of the cowl. The cloak is lined with red inside and the bottom of the cloak is lined with white fur. She has a high white collar attached to her cloak. She also wears a golden pendant that seems to connect with the collar. She also wears orange-yellow high-heel pumps. To top off her royal appearance, the Evil Queen wears a golden crown atop her head with 5 spikes on the front and a jewel on the tip of the middle and tallest spike. The color scheme of her attire represents her pride and vanity. In her witch disguise, the Queen's physical appearance changes from that of a youthfully beautiful queen with an unfeeling look on her face to that of an ugly, old peddler vividly displaying emotions. She has long, tangled white hair, thick eyebrows, green eyes and dark rings around her eyes. Her nose becomes long and crooked with a large wart, and she only has one visible tooth on her bottom jaw. Her hands are gnarled and have pointed, dirty fingernails. She dons a black, cowled robe that retains the hanging sleeves of her gown. She also seems to wear gray slippers. Walt Disney described the Queen as "a mixture of Lady Macbeth and the Big Bad Wolf... her beauty is sinister, mature, plenty of curves... she becomes ugly and menacing when scheming and mixing her poisons; magic fluids transform her into an old, witch-like hag." Personality The Queen does not appear to be significantly involved in governing her kingdom (since she is solely focused on being the fairest in the land), though the skeletal remains of prisoners in her dungeon points to her being a cruel ruler. She wants nothing more than to be the fairest in the land. She is cold, cruel, and has an extreme vanity that made her utterly intolerant of rivals. Her vanity and jealousy of Snow White's superior beauty and the Prince's attentions eventually drove her to murderous insanity. That she transforms herself into a hideous hag and conjures a poison named 'The Sleeping Death' to achieve this end is a sign of her determination and desperation. The Witch, being an alternate form of the Queen, has some of her personality traits, most notably her vanity and unstable jealousy of Snow White, kept intact. However, due in part to the transformation, she has also become more outwardly maniacal and sadistic, constantly cackling insanely as well as once trying to play an extremely cruel joke on her pet raven by making it seem as though she wants it to eat the poisoned apple. Despite her insanity, she was also extremely intelligent and calculating, wanting to ensure that she not overlook anything in order to make her plans an absolute success. This trait was especially evident in her stopping herself while gloating about how the poisoned apple will ensure Snow White's eventual demise in order to look up whether there was a cure to the effects of the poisoned apple that would cause her plans to fail. However, the book My Side of the Story: Snow White/The Queen reveals that the Queen actually was very kind to Snow White at first (she even has a portrait of her stepdaughter on one of the walls of the castle), but she gets too wound up in her jealousy which ultimately results in her untimely end. The book also reveals her, when not in her castle, owning a grocery store (as seen in the last page of the book) and that the Huntsman was a very good friend of hers. She also, according to her explanation, made Snow White a servant in her castle to ensure that her stepdaughter is not lazy (Aside this, The Queen also tell Snow White to do chores everyday because it's a "good exercise" - this is proven in one scene from the book where Snow White eats some cake, and then The Queen snatches it from her stepdaughter, then tell Snow White not to eat some sweets because she is "still in growth & needs to die. Also, according to The Queen, she never asks the Magic Mirror who is the fairest in the land. But the Magic Mirror keeps complimenting on how beautiful The Queen is (in it's opinion). In the scene where Snow White first meets The Prince and flirts with him, The Queen watches them from her window, with a worried look on her face, worried about Snow White's safety with an older boy (whereas in the film, she watches them with anger & jealousy of Snow White's beauty). In addition, the Sereno Valentino novel Fairest of All paints her in a far more tragic light, that of an extremely broken woman who due to emotional abuse from her father, was feeling extremely insecure about whether she truly was beautiful. It also showed that she did initially genuinely care for Snow White as if she were her own daughter before the king's untimely demise.